The Ministry of Health, the largest provider of healthcare services in Malaysia,
has always been concerned with healthcare quality issue. Its
Medical program,
headed by Deputy Director General (Medical), Datuk Dr. Noor Hisham, has a Section
for
Quality in Healthcare
that is specifically tasked with overseeing and implementing the MOH’s Quality Assurance
Program and its diverse Quality Improvement activities, under a variety of rubrics:

The latest initiative to join this veritable list is Clinical Performance Monitoring
through the application of a Statistical Process Control technique, CUSUM. This
initiative is targeting individual clinical services.

For each clinical service in the MOH provided by a particular clinical discipline,
a patient registry is established to serve as the necessary information infrastructure
to provide the functional capacity for data collection, analysis, reporting and
dissemination. An online service CUSUM charting service is developed to enable individual
clinicians to access his or her patients’ records in a patient registry and automatically
produces CUSUM chart for selected procedures or care processes.

The Ministry of Health, the largest provider of healthcare services in Malaysia,
has always been concerned with healthcare quality issue. Quality measurements in
MOH are well developed and have encompassed both the broad indicator approach (such
as the NIA) as well as a more focused approach targeting individual clinical services.
For the latter, a patient registry is established dedicated to a particular clinical
service to provide the necessary information infrastructure and the functional capacity
for data collection, analysis, reporting and dissemination.

eCUSUM is an online service initiated by our Deputy Director General (Medical),
Dato Noor Hisham, to support quality improvement strategy by individual clinical
services. It aims to improve the current quality measurement and reporting by targeted
clinical service that is supported by an established
patient registry.
The online service enables individual clinicians to access his
or her patients’ records in a patient registry and automatically produces CUSUM
chart for selected procedures.

CUSUM is a clinical performance monitoring tool designed to detect small changes
in the treatment process. The chart will produce a signal indicating a shift in
performance thus providing early warning to the clinician to take the necessary
corrective action before patients are harmed by deteriorating performance. CUSUM
is one among other statistical process control tools that are widely used in manufacturing
industry and are increasingly being applied in healthcare too. For more details
on CUSUM,
please refer to published papers in Bibliography.